A blog for some techno tips and tricks (mostly Linux-related), soccer, and whatever's on my mind.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

IPv6 Madness

I've been doing some playing with IPv6 lately, since the world is out of
IPv4 addresses (wait, didn't that happen a long time ago???
Whatever...). It's been really interesting to learn about the actual
protocol and how it works compared to IPv4. I've got a fully routed /64
IPv6 network at home, but just a couple systems at home using
auto-configured IPv6 address. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, especially
because I've been putting off learning about it for so long (truth be
told, I was a bit intimidated by it -- didn't need to be).

If you want to play with IPv6 and your ISP doesn't yet support native IPv6, you can easily set up a tunnel through http://www.tunnelbroker.net/
(provided by Hurricane Electric Internet Services) for free. They also have free DNS hosting (with full support for AAAA
and reverse IPv6 records, of course) and they offer a free, online IPv6
certification (I got to the "Sage" level last week).

I found IPv6 Essentials
from O'Reilly to be very helpful in understanding how it all comes
together. You can get it in a DRM-free ebook format from O'Reilly's site, which is pretty awesome.